Director – Global Investment Team (12-Month FTC)

About Wavemaker

We believe there always is a better way to grow. We positively provoke growth for our clients by reshaping consumer decision-making and experiences through media, content and technology. Fuelled by the world’s most powerful consumer data, we understand where and how marketing can intervene decisively to help the world’s leading brands win more sales.

Our 7,600 people across 90 markets provoke growth through:

• deep knowledge of our clients’ business
• confidence to challenge what’s gone before
• the support to go further than we thought possible

We are a part of GroupM, WPP’s global media investment management company. Discover more on wavemakerglobal.com, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The Wavemaker Investment team sits at the very heart of our business, managing over $13 billion in media billings across the globe. We are structured around 4 pillars of Accountability, Trading & Investment, Commercial Solutions and Partnerships to bring market leading value and investment thought leadership to our clients.

Vision for the role

We want someone to take investment responsibility for key some of our key global clients. You will be expected to drive the client dialogue on current media performance and landscape, as well as support in the development of future facing models as client and marketplace needs evolve. Managing a small team and working with our local markets, the successful candidate will also need relationship building capabilities to successfully align local, regional, and global needs.

Reports to: Andy Niblett, Senior Partner – Global Investment

Based: London with global travel as required

Role and Responsibilities

Accountability for existing clients and New Business offers - Delivery & Management

• Establish yourself as the client’s trusted advisor on all trading and value matters, working closely with the local Wavemaker teams and the client to ensure our trading delivery remains in line with all requirements

• Manage the relationship with media auditors working across your clients, agreeing relevant and reasonable media value performance KPIs with the auditor and client

• Work with local market trading teams to ensure that they fully understand commitment structures and are equipped to maximize incentive delivery against these

• Ensure any client delivery issues are flagged with local and global agency / GroupM management to ensure a quick resolution

• To be an advocate of the Wavemaker holistic value framework , advising teams on suitable levers to be used for existing clients and in pitches

Investment Strategy and Commercial Alignment

• Work within the Wavemaker global investment community to identify value creation opportunities

• Proactively identify incremental value opportunities for your client portfolio, working within the Wavemaker global investment community

• Work with commercial teams to ensure that the design and application of trading-based incentives are feasible and achievable

• Understand all Nexus offerings, and be able to bring this together as part of an over-arching investment strategy for clients

Leadership and People Development

• Support the leadership team in establishing needs now and in the future, to ensure sufficient resourcing and succession planning is in place

• Create motivating career goals for your team and work with GroupM to create required training programs for ongoing development.

• Contribute to the Wavemaker investment community and ensure that best practice is regularly shared, and local / regional teams are suitably supported

Required Experience and skills

• Substantial experience in one or a combination of local media buying, international media buying coordination and evaluation

• Excellent client relationship skills with the ability to communicate complexity across multiple geographies and cultures.

• Strong understanding of digital buying and evaluation experience including an up-to-date understanding of the digital landscape

• Commercially minded, entrepreneurial approach to revenue generation

• Solid understanding of client marketing and procurement functions

• History of successful team leadership, training, and development

• Keen eye for detail and desire to tell a compelling story through the numbers

• Confident presenting to senior clients and senior internal management

• Highly numerate, curious problem-solver

What makes us different:

As team we are deliberately different to the typical global investment teams that exist in other agencies:

• We have developed market-leading technology to manage client commitments with unmatched accuracy to reduce the labor requirement (both centrally and locally)
• We encourage our team to focus on managing future opportunities and threats with our clients rather than spending too much time talking about the past
• We mandate diversity in both the staffing of the team and the work they do – we expect everyone to proactively develop thought-leadership and initiatives to keep us at the front of the business
• We enjoy brilliant in-house training and development programs
• We are relatively free of hierarchy and look to put new joiners in front of clients at the earliest opportunity

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